Daily Score Blog

Not in our bioregion, but interesting anyway:  the L.A. Times opines that carbon taxes would work better than a cap-and-trade system:

A carbon tax simply imposes a tax for polluting based on the amount emitted, thus encouraging polluters to clean up and entrepreneurs to come up with alternatives. The tax is constant and predictable. It doesn't require the creation of a new energy trading market, and it can be collected by existing state and federal agencies. It's straightforward and much harder to manipulate by special interests than the politicized process of allocating carbon credits.

Note: that's their opinion, not mine.  As for me, I'm confused, and desperately trying to figure out how I feel about carbon taxes vs. cap and trade vs. auctioned credits vs. who-knows-what-else.  It's really, really important stuff, but also (obviously) complicated.

So, dear reader:  if you have any comments or preferences you'd like to share here, please do!  I'll promise to read and respond to every one.

Apparently, the California legislature is considering feebates to make new cars and trucks more fuel-efficient.  Go, Cali!

You can read more about feebates here.  It's a pretty awesome idea:  people who buy gas guzzlers pay a fee, which gets rebated to people who buy gas misers.  If it works right, it can be even more effective than CAFE standards and the like, because there's no limit to how efficient the cars will get:  the feebates provide a perpetual incentive for greater fuel-efficiency.

Sightline (among many others) has been touting feebates for at least a decade.  But -- as has been typical in recent years -- California's the first out of the blocks in this part of the world in giving them a serious airing.  I don't mean to downplay what Washington and Oregon have been doing recently on energy policy; but do we always have to play follow the leader when it comes to climate change?

Please, if you have some spare time -- or are bored with work after a nice long weekend away -- skim this (pdf link) report on economic mobility in the US. Or at least see the charts and summary over at Washington Monthly.

But if you really don't have time, here are the key points:

• Americans move up and down the economic ladder far less than is commonly believed -- and much, much less than residents of Northern Europe. (Apparently, Horatio Alger isn't dead, he's just moved to Denmark.)
• On average, American men today earn less than their fathers did, after adjusting for inflation. Families earn a bit more, but only because they're more likely to have two wage earners. (Yes, yes, I know that measuring inflation over long periods is tricky. Still, it was much easier a generation ago to raise a family on a single income than it is today.)
• Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for years, even though the economy has grown far more productive. At this point, when the economy "grows," only the very well-off see much benefit.
  

The interesting thing to me about this report is that it's not from the usual suspects.  The Economic Mobility Project includes researchers from the Urban Institute, who've been saying this stuff for years; but also from The Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, which...um...aren't typically thought of as economic rabble-rousers.